Arts Faculty News

Dr Therese Davis, co-director with Dr Adrian Martin of the new Research Unit in Film Culture and Theory, recently participated as an international guest in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Indigeneity and Performance, a series of international research workshops funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK.

Dr Davis gave a presentation on how Indigenous filmmakers in Australia are adopting and adapting film as a means for transmitting Indigenous cultural knowledge and history in ways that are radicalising conceptions of historical film and knowledge.

The Heritage and Material Culture workshop analysed functions of heritage within specific social/cultural groups as well as in cross-cultural situations. Heritage was considered not just in terms of transmitting and preserving objects, discourses, values and practices, but also in an expanded sense as mobilising historical understanding or social memory to nourish a desire for solidarity between generations.

Further information on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Indigeneity and Performance is available from the Beyond Text site.

Brolgas entwined

Dr John Bradley of the Centre for Australian Indigenous Stuudies has been invited to attend a workshop on Orality and Transmission at the University of London. The seminar will examine cultural transmission by focusing closely on oral practices as aspects of intangible heritage. He will take the six completed animations developed with staff from Berwick Campus to demonstrate how the Yanyuwa people of Borroloola have engaged with technology as a way of maintaining important community narratives. The seminar will also explore contemporary indigenous performance, demonstrating that across a range of artistic, social, legal, cultural and educational domains, orature functions not so much as a preliterate mode of communication but rather as an emphatically embodied transaction. In this respect, a key aim is to explore ways in which orality, literacy and mediality dynamically interact, particularly in the reception and preservation of oral practices. Performative aspects of storytelling and witnessing, and their role in collective constructions of historical memory in indigenous cultures, will all be a part of the discussion at this two day event.

Visit the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies site

Book cover

A vast archive of photographs taken at a long-forgotten Aboriginal station near Healesville has provided a remarkable insight into Aboriginal community life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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Mr Nicholas Morris with Prof Stephen Parker.

The late Monash academic Lorna Lippmann was committed to improving the plight of Indigenous Australians.

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